Mohammed Massoud Morsi: Why I Turned From Journalism to Fiction

A twelve-year-old girl named Sara, standing in the rubble of her bombed home in Gaza, told writer Mohammed Massoud Morsi: "That one!" — picking her own portrait, in her school uniform, so her friends could see how much she missed them. "These are my friends who are still alive," she added, asking for a second photograph. Her other friends were dead, and the cemetery where they were buried had itself been bombed.

That encounter, Morsi writes in a new essay, is what pushed him from journalism into fiction. His book The Hair of the Pigeon is published by David R. Godine Publisher.

What happened in Gaza?

Morsi had traveled to Gaza on assignment for a Danish NGO. On the outskirts of Shuja'iyya, he met Sara and her family. An Israeli air strike had destroyed their house; only pillars of concrete remained, with most of the family's belongings under the rubble.

Sara did not want to talk about the war. She wanted to talk about her friends and about school — a school that had also, "for no apparent reason," been turned to rubble, Morsi writes. She dressed in her school uniform and directed the photo shoot herself.

Days earlier, Morsi had stood in the Shifa morgue in Rimal, North Gaza, watching parents search through children's bodies and body parts for their own. "That day stayed with me, leaving a deep cut in my soul, one that I doubt will ever heal," he writes. He describes Gaza as "the world's largest open air prison" — a place he could leave, and Sara could not.

When he suggested praying at the graves of her friends, Sara refused. "We can't. The occupation killed them, again!" she said. The bombing of the cemetery had scattered bones and body parts for relatives to collect "like a puzzle." Then she smiled and delivered the line that became the title of Morsi's published feature: "It's only in Gaza you die twice!"

What changed at a Copenhagen fish counter?

Back in Denmark, Morsi was waiting for a friend outside a row of basement shops in Copenhagen. He glanced into a seafood shop and saw his own two-day-old feature, It is only in Gaza you die twice, lying on a pile of newspapers. The fishmonger slapped an Atlantic cod down on top of it.

"Sara's world had gone past its due date. And mine was turned upside down," he writes. In that moment, he concluded he had failed as a journalist: "One part of the world digests the news of the other world the news is happening to."

Why fiction, then?

Morsi's answer is structural. He argues that newspaper stories carry a shelf life, while the twenty-four-hour news cycle "leaves little room for reflection or deeper understanding of our shared humanity." Fiction, he says, can do what reportage cannot.

"I realized that the only way of keeping my soul whole is to write the whole story, even if I'm writing what we call fiction," he writes. He calls it "a way of writing that to me, is always able to retrieve the fragments of life which time wishes to bury."

His target reader is specific. He wants readers to relate to his narrator and "close the final page knowing there is no Us or Them."

What does this change for how we read about Palestine?

Morsi frames the problem as one of supply and imagination. He asks when he last saw a film about a Palestinian girl who dreams of going to school, or such a story on any streaming landing page, or on airport book covers. Western publishing and Hollywood, he argues, offer "a careful selection of story" that maintains a moral hierarchy — "We hold the moral high ground. They are the enemy" — despite, as he puts it, "it's We who have been doing the killing for the last half millennia."

His model is the literature of the World War II genocide: fictions that illuminated the stories of people who were dehumanized. "My hope is that the same will be true for Palestinians, who have been subjected to unfathomable atrocities," he writes. "The point is to capture love and humanity that endures in the face of that extreme violence."

Morsi's stake in the argument is personal as well as reportorial. Growing up Arab in Denmark, he writes, he was reduced to a caricature — "if it was Hussein, I was called Saddam" — and fought stereotypes drawn from sources as mainstream as Tintin, the popular comic of his childhood. His Danish school, he says, became "a psychological groundhog's day" of brawls and fragile truces.

The through-line is blunt: "War on the screen is so detached from reality. In reality, there are no heroes and no glory, only worlds that collapse and dreams that shatter." His wager is that fiction — not another headline — is the form that can hold those worlds intact.

The Hair of the Pigeon by Mohammed Massoud Morsi is available from David R. Godine Publisher.